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A Model Funeral

On a recent afternoon, a group of strikingly attractive mourners were milling around outside St. John’s Lutheran Church, on Christopher Street, smoking cigarettes. Their cheekbones gave them away: they were models, gathered to tape the funeral of Preston Chaunsumlit, a fashion casting director and the star of the Web series “Model Files,” which began its second season on May 21st.

Parodies of the fashion world are hardly a novelty, but “Model Files” has the distinction of being an inside job. The series was created last year by VFiles, a social network for fashion aficionados, and developed a following thanks in large part to Chaunsumlit, thirty-three, who plays a charmingly hapless version of himself, an amiable dolphin swimming with the sharks of haute couture. In short, zippy episodes, Chaunsumlit runs after young mothers in SoHo, soliciting their children to model an Opening Ceremony baby line, and shoots a campaign for North Korean denim. He speaks breezily of “nodels” (not models) and “maiters” (model waiters), and instructs the men and women he hires for ad campaigns in the ways of the business (“Can you look more like a real person?”). The current season finds Chaunsumlit down and out in SoSo—South SoHo—in spite of his newfound fame. In the finale, he gets hit by an S.U.V. while guzzling a coconut water, a beverage whose value in the New York fashion world, according to Model Files, is roughly equivalent to that of fresh blood in Transylvania.

“This is what Paris looks like before a show,” Chaunsumlit said. “Or after.” He was standing outside the gates of St. John’s, watching his mourners arrive. At Yves Saint Laurent’s funeral, in 2008, Carla Bruni wore a sleek black pantsuit in tribute to the man who had liberated women’s legs with le smoking. When Alexander McQueen died, Daphne Guinness arrived at Saint Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge attached like a solitary tent pole to one of the designer’s billowing black capes. For his big day, Chaunsumlit had opted for a mix of comfort and style: male nursing shoes (white clogs by Dansko, bought on eBay), APC jeans, an Yves Saint Laurent jacket, a shirt from the Salvation Army, and a white pleather baseball cap with a denim brim, worn backwards over shoulder-length hair. His white ankle socks had been scavenged from the VFiles office. “I need to do laundry,” he said, apologetically.

Chaunsumlit’s mother is from Manila; his father is Chinese Thai. He grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, checked the “other” box on school surveys, and fled to New York in his teens. “That’s always part of the program, that you’re going to get out,” he said. “You finish your schooling and then get out of this godforsaken little piece of hell.”

A few feet away, Cole Michael Mohr, a blue-eyed model with a wolfish face, shifted impatiently from foot to foot. He, too, had gotten out, in his case from Houston, Texas. A scout discovered him, seven years ago, smoking a joint on Park Avenue and Twentieth Street. His skin is an ode to late-night trips to tattoo parlors: “cowabunga” written in cursive on his neck; two blue shapes like can-openers on his forearm, representing Matisse’s paper cut-out of the Venus de Milo; faded “tres puntos” dots underneath his right eye. “I have the Medicis’ tomb on my back,” he said, lifting up his shirt. Recently, Mohr appeared in “Disconnect,” a film about the erotic risks of the Internet age by Henry Alex Rubin, the director of “Girl, Interrupted.” “I play a Web-cam prostitute, and Marc Jacobs is my pimp, so I was like, ‘Oh, cool, art imitating life.’ ”

Seated in pews, the models and model-like extras pouted convincingly behind dark glasses. “A couple of people should definitely be texting,” one of the show’s producers called out. She was swaddled in a black robe of the sort worn by patrons of fine hair salons, “printemps/été 1986: comme des garçons” printed on its back. “Check your Instagram.”

No character on “Model Files” has the magnificent pettiness or Cruella de Vil fanaticism of a great fashion tyrant. The show is too sweetly zany for that. The closest thing to an antagonist is RJ, a preening narcissist played by RJ King, who lives, reality-show-style, with other male models in a frat house set up at the James Hotel. (King had been out late the night before with Chaunsumlit, getting “sauced”—another Chaunsumlit word—at a party for Versace, and showed up at St. John’s an hour late, hoarse and sleepy eyed.) But Chaunsumlit was inclined to sympathize with the situation of Miranda Priestly, the villain played by Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada.” In one episode of “Model Files,” Chaunsumlit asks his assistant to be a human table as a prop for a shoot; in life as well as in art, his opinion of their capabilities is low. “I mean, I guess the protagonist of ‘Devil Wears Prada’ was a good person, and she was willing to learn. That’s great. All of us should be good people willing to learn,” he said, generously. He paused. “It doesn’t mean you’re good at your job. She should have been fired. The villain was actually being nice by hiring her.”

By 1 P.M., it was time to start shooting. A stream of models paraded down the church’s aisle, cameramen scuttling in front of them. They fanned out in front of the altar and struck poses. A male model with the thick-necked, close-cropped solidity of Joe Camel stood at attention in a transparent mesh shirt. Others were dressed in Luar Zepol, a New York-based line favored by VFiles: thick black smocks and knee-high gladiator boots with an elaborate system of padded straps suggesting childproof dungeon gear.

On the second take, the models carried tall ceremonial candles mounted on poles that had been stashed by the church’s entrance. Even without the usual pounding beat and flashbulbs, they seemed to be hitting a groove. “Someone should sing Ave Maria,” said the producer. Chaunsumlit, who was raised both Catholic (his mother’s) and Buddhist (his father’s), watched from the wings, a prop crutch slung under each arm. The funeral, it turns out, was preëmptive; soon he would reveal to the mourners—spoiler alert—that he had organized the whole thing as a casting call.

And when it was finally time to meet his maker—what kind of ceremony did Chaunsumlit have in mind? “Oh, I really don’t care,” he said outside the church, blinking in the bright light. “What is the value of one’s body? I mean, we do such screwed-up things to it. It’s just a body.”